Dr. Naor Bar-Zeev appointed as the new deputy director of IVAC

The International Vaccine Access Center (IVAC) is pleased to announce that Naor Bar-Zeev, MBBS(Hons), MPH, MBiostat, PhD, has been appointed as the new deputy director of IVAC. Naor joined the IVAC team in 2017 as an Associate Professor in the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. His interests lie in understanding how to maximize existing and future vaccines’ benefits in low-resourced high mortality settings, how to protect vulnerable groups, and how to optimize vaccine impact and effectiveness evaluation methods. Naor leads the Antibiotics in Childhood Diarrhea (ABCD) trial in Malawi, a randomized clinical trial of Azithromycin’s efficacy in reducing mortality and stunting in children with moderate to severe diarrhea. He is also principal investigator on a typhoid fever cost of illness study in Malawi.

Before joining Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Naor led the Vaccines Research Group at the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme at the University of Malawi for five years. In Malawi, he established VacSurv, a national vaccine surveillance program, and worked as a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital. He was a member of the National Immunization Technical Advisory Group in Malawi, and on the Ministerial taskforce for rotavirus vaccine introduction. He was a founding member of the “Immunizing Pregnant Women and Infants (IMPRINT) Network”, funded by UK’s Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF). He is also a member of the “Advancing Maternal Immunization (AMI) Collaboration” led by PATH. Dr. Bar-Zeev is dual certified in general pediatrics and infectious diseases as a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians and the Australasian College of Tropical Medicine.